Idea: I’d love to see the ability to hide and display Plasma panels in other ways while customizing their behaviour the same (Eg: Making Windows go behind them, changing position, etc).
This could be by using a button on another panel (eg. Windows 10’s notification tray or Windows Vista beta sidebars, both using an expand button for the sidebar),
This idea came by way of attempting to sort of recreate Windows’ old Gadgets sidebar, but finding that using an entire panel was inadequate, for multiple reasons, a few of which arguably deserve a bug report more than this post. Chief among them, though, is that accidental activation of the panel was pretty common when using Dodge Windows, which is extra annoying when your panel is set wide enough to show the contents of things like the Notifications widget and whatnot, as you have to move the mouse a considerable distance to clear it to try to do whatever you were doing again.
This would be helpful not only for people like me trying to do silly little niche things like this, but also for recreating a Notification setup closer to Windows 10/11- which, while you can resize the Notification panel, you can only do so when it’s placed as a separate plasmoid, not while it’s in the tray, and does not show a calendar widget or anything like Win10/11.
It would also be nice (though unlikely) to be able to make Plasma panels completely clear and un-themed, with the plasmoids themselves providing their own backdrop (same as if they were placed on the desktop).
At the end of the day, the functionality is almost viable, and being able to take something like Windows’ notification sidebar and combine it with Plasma’s vast customization options seems only logical. At the end of the day, if this wasn’t a semi-intended feature, full-content plasmoids wouldn’t be able to display in panels, even when the panel is wide enough, right?